About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Wednesday, September 09, 2015

Episode 3, “Violence and Solutions”, of “A Path Appears”,
based on the book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WeDunn, visits two
locations: Atlanta, and Kibera, Kenya.

In Atlanta, Nicholas Kristof and Regina Hall visit the Women’s
Resource Center, to meet with Ayonna Johnson, and learn how the legal system
creates hurdles for women to escape from domestic violence. A psychologist and educator,
Sulaiman Nurridin, representing Men Stopping Violence, works with the male
abusers. This is a problem that happens
in every community, but Atlanta (the home of CNN) gets a lot of attention these
days in the media for its big-city social problems, even while having many
areas of very affluent African-American homeowners. The last time I was landing
in a plane there (in 2014) myself, a woman in the next seat pointed to the
north, to Marietta, where the Braves baseball team will build an unnecessary
new stadium, away from the city and mass transit. You can see into the current
system and games in progress while driving down I-75.

But the most interesting part of the film happens in Kibera,
Kenya, a “suburb” near Nairobi, and one of the largest slums in Africa (even
allowing for apartheid South Africa). There are no utilities, and residents
make desperate attempts to divert clean water intended for wealthier areas.
Trash and squalor abound everywhere, and the film has many “landscape” and
intimate street scenes showing “what it is like”. The weather is cloudy and
drizzly, and journalists wear raingear, in a warm climate (but the elevation is
about 6000 feet). Mia Farrow joins,
along with her young adult son Ronan Farrow, now building a career as a
journalist. The star of the episode is Kennedy Odede, who had won a scholarship
for education in the US but returned after getting his degree. He is married to Jessica Posner Odede, who
helps run the “blue-box” Kibera School for Girls. The latter part of this
section concerns the abuse of a 4-year-old girl, who turns out to be a
12-year-old boy.

About ten years ago, a young gay male couple, one of whom
attends a local Presbyterian church, went to Kenya on a mission. They had to keep their relationship secret
while there but did not encounter problems.

However, we all know the violence in the country, with the
attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. On the other hand, Prince William of
England had vacationed there with Kate well before their marriage, so the rich “play”
there on safaris, with little interaction with the people. Next door, Uganda
has a horrible record on gay rights (more publicly reported than Kenya’s).

It is difficult for “privileged” young adults to go to
countries like this and work there (for mining or oil companies, or for charity
groups). This may become a as big a challenge
– in the context of maybe a national service initiative in the future – as
conventional military service and deployment (in a world where we no longer
have a draft).

I personally don’t connect to “women’s issues” as something
apart from everything else – poverty itself and general economic inequality is
much bigger (as well as “inequality of opportunity” as in episode 2). I also
don’t react immediately to problems caused by “other people’s crimes” – but when
things come one’s way, at some point one has to “step up.”

Bill Clinton and Susan Sarandon comment at the end of the
episode (as George Clooney does so at the beginning).

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